ISTANBUL: Turkey wants to turn a page in its strained relationship with the European Union to obtain visa-free travel, promising changes to its counterterrorism law to comply with the bloc’s human rights norms.
Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said Wednesday that Turkey has submitted proposals to the EU showing it will comply with the remaining seven of 72 criteria required to win its citizens unrestricted travel in the 26 EU states comprising the Schengen Area.
“We hope and expect that this will win Turkish-EU relations new momentum. I can say that a new process has begun from today,” Kalin said at a news conference.
A clause already in Turkey’s penal code that says critical opinions expressed in journalism are not criminal will now be added to the counterterrorism law, Cumhuriyet newspaper reported. Its omission from the separate anti-terrorism statute has helped turn Turkey into the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, with more than 120 behind bars for their work.
Other changes Turkey will make include steps to fight corruption, improve data protection and fully implement a readmission agreement for migrants, according to Cumhuriyet.
The measures, agreed upon in a 2016 deal that saw EU candidate country Turkey stemming the flow of irregular migration in exchange for visa liberalization and 6 billion euros in refugee aid, comes even as ties with European nations remain fraught.
Just this week, the Netherlands announced it was formally withdrawing its ambassador to Ankara after he was denied entry for almost a year and that it will not accept a new Turkish envoy to the Hague.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has compared the Dutch and German governments to Nazis. For its part, the EU has decried his crackdown on journalists, opposition politicians and civil society that has jailed more than 50,000 people in the wake of an abortive military coup in 2016.
Amending the counterterrorism law “is not the only benchmark, but it is the most sensitive and critical one,” said Laura Batalla Adam, secretary-general of the European Parliament’s Turkey Forum. “Now we are seeing a very important rapprochement. Both sides acknowledge the need for a constructive and honest dialogue [and] we are beginning to see a normalization in our relations,” she told Al-Monitor.
